


Fast Car: A Drabble Collection

by objectlesson



Series: Drabble Collections [6]
Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, Pining, Romance, Sexual Tension, Wrestling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:54:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23957227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: A series of Ruth/Debbie drabbles I wrote on tumblr! Check individual chapter notes  for warnings, ratings, and tags.
Relationships: Debbie Eagan/Ruth Wilder
Series: Drabble Collections [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1727191
Comments: 22
Kudos: 52





	1. don't cry

**Author's Note:**

> Some Ruth/Debbie stories! Please check the chapter notes for each installation for a complete list of tags specific to the story. There are a lot of triggers in these so read carefully!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pre-series, Debbie POV, comp het, angst, internalized homophobia. Rated teen. 

When Debbie tells Ruth she’s moving all the way to Malibu with Mark, Ruth bursts into fucking tears. Like it’s about her. Like it’s _all_ about her, every change in Debbie’s life a gambit _solely_ to wound Ruth Wilder. Still, she feels terrible, because when it comes down to it, Debbie loves Ruth more than she will ever love Mark. But women just can’t _live_ in poverty with their best friends forever, not when there are babies to be had, rings to be worn, gorgeous sprawling two-story homes in Malibu Debbie has dreamed about her whole fucking life to be lived in, like living in dreams is the same thing as happiness. 

“Please don't cry,” Debbie says, thumbs biting into Ruth’s bony shoulders, digging beneath the elegant dip beneath her collar bones. “I’ll just feel like more shit if you cry.” 

“I always cry, of course I’m gonna cry! What did you think I was gonna do!?” Ruth sputters, throwing her hands up and dislodging Debbie’s in the process, usually porcelain smooth face newly pink-cheeked, streaked in wet. Debbie wants to reach out and wipe the stickiness away, but sometimes she doesn’t know _how_ to touch Ruth without it seeming too heavy, too invasive. She saves tender touch for Mark these days, and it’s so much _effort_ to do it, it seems like a shame to waste it on anyone else. Touching her husband is a favor. Touching Ruth is—well. It’s something else entirely. “I’m happy for you,” Ruth says then, hanging her head, shaking it so her short pony tail swings back and forth. “I really am. I’m also just. The selfish part of me is sad.” 

“I know, I knew you would be,” Debbie mumbles. “I am, too.” 

“No you’re not,” Ruth scoffs, stepping in, fitting herself suddenly into Debbie’s arms. Debbie balks at first but then she recovers from it and holds Ruth close, breath caught in her throat, stomach dropping because it always drops when she realizes it feels _different_ to touch Ruth than it does Mark, when she realizes she’s not just pursuing this blindly, she’s hurtling herself headlong into it, knowing full-well it’s a lie. “You don’t have to be sad because _I’m_ sad. You should be happy. You have everything you want, now.” 

_I should be happy_ Debbie thinks, mouth trembling against Ruth’s hair as she schools her tears, forces them back down. “Noteverything,” she mumbles.

Ruth pulls away, wipes her eyes. “Well, I’m sure you’ll get it, whatever it is. You always do.” 

Debbie shakes her head, sits back heavily into Ruth’s well worn couch-pillows. And then she laughs a cold, hollow laugh. “No, it’s—it’s the sort of thing that never actually happens. A…I dunno. A stupid little girl thing. Like, did you ever wish you could fly, when you were a kid?” 

Ruth sniffles, draws her knees to her chest and murmurs, “Yeah, but I thought if I believed hard enough, I could. I’d jump off the playground slide over and over again, thinking, this time…this time is the time.” She coughs, and hides her face, making a self-deprecating noise in her throat. “So much has changed.” 

Debbie doesn’t know what to say to that, so instead, she throws the bitter dredges of her glass back, pretending it is champagne and not boxed wine from their fridge, which, soon, won’t be her fridge anymore, at all. It will only be Ruth’s. 

She creeps her finger across the space between their bodies, and risks holding Ruth’s hand, for a moment. Squeezing it, like friends do. Like she _thinks_ friends do. She’s never quite sure, really. 


	2. just a bruise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rated teen. Season two, Vegas, Ruth POV, pining, mentions of semi-consensual rough sex with men, bruising, sexism. 

Ruth sees it because she’s staring at Debbie’s ass as she steps into her rhinestone encrusted Liberty Belle Nylons. 

It’s a huge, fresh bruise, spanning from the middle-back of her hamstring up to the juicy curve of her right cheek, where the muscle tenses and flickers under Ruth’s grip when she needs to clutch her there for a hold. She blinks, wondering if she did that, or if it’s from something else. “What’s that?” she asks, pointing, tucking a bobby pin into her hair nonchalantly. 

“What’s what?” Debbie retorts. Her eyes always look so cutting and bright surrounded by that glittering blue make up, and even though they’re mostly friends again and things have been easier since the show came to Vegas (Maybe it’s touching each other every night while crowds cheer), it still scares Ruth a little bit, makes her heart clench up like Debbie might spit something cruel at her, break her ankle again. 

Ruth stands, gently swats the dappled purple now hidden under Debbie’s leotard. “This. The shiner.” 

“It’s nothing,” Debbie says, a warning note to her voice as she turns away abruptly, grabbing her skirt to hoist on. “It’s just a bruise.” 

An alarm goes off in Ruth’s chest, something primal born from being a woman, from being afraid. “Well, what from? Did I do it?” 

“Ugh, no, I wish,” Dannie snaps, fastening her waistband and twisting at the waist, so the skirt spins heavily around her. “Some fine, young valet from Texas did it!” she says, putting on her Liberty Belle Voice, perhaps to soften the blow. “I fucking hate men,” she says then, in her usual flat, harsh tone. “They have no fucking idea how big and strong they are sometimes. Bulls in china shops. Big stupid puppies.” 

“He _hit_ you?” Ruth gasps, scandalized, rounding on Debbie, backing her into the wall. “What happened?” 

“He didn’t _hit me_ hit me, he asked to spank my ass and I said yes and next morning, I look like you body slammed me into the mat too hard. Because he clearly didn’t know what he was doing. Spanking is not supposed to leave marks like that, you know? Not unless you _want_ it to. So I kicked him out” she explains, shaking her head, gaze flickering. She’s playing it off like no big deal but Ruth knows better, knows the way Debbie looks when she’s putting on the happy face, the wife-mask or the mom-mask or the producer-mask and pretending everything’s fine when she’s actually pissed, or hurt. There are a lot of things she wants to say, but nothing will come out the way she means it to right now, she knows it. Sometimes Debbie twists her words, puts a hook in her and pulls and every sentence thereafter is stained in blood. 

“You let guys spank you?” is what she ends up sputtering, because well _fuck._ She always thinks of Debbie as this empowered sex goddess with men, never taking shit, tying them up and whipping them or whatever. Making them eat out of her hand, lick her stilettos. It makes her feel sort of sick and hot in the face to imagine some Texan valet getting to just— _spank_ her.

“Sometimes. God, I should have known you’d be vanilla in bed,” Debbie says then, grabbing a cigarette and lightning it up. She blows smoke in Ruth’s face. “Why do you look so worried? You beat me up every night.” 

_Yeah, but that’s different. I care about you. I love you._ She thinks in a wild, self-deprecating spike of feeling, but then she quiets that down, like she always does. She hates being messy, _needy_ while Debbie is forever cool and remote, some beautiful star fixed in the sky Ruth gets to look at and wonder what it might be like to shine so brightly. “I just! I don’t know,” she says, shrugging. “I’ll try not to touch it too much tonight. And um, here’s some arnica,” she mumbles, rummaging around in her duffle to find the half-empty tube, something to do, something to _put on,_ so she doesn’t have to think about broken blood vessels and how even the strongest women still get hit. Still _want_ to be hit. 

“You can touch it,” Debbie says, coughing. “I don’t give a fuck.” 


	3. sunscreen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Debbie POV, angst, season one, swimming, motels, sunscreen, pining, jealousy, body comparison, brief mentions of weight related envy. Teen and up audiences.

You wish you could stay purely angry at Ruth. But _somehow,_ she is the one person in the universe besides your actual honest to god, flesh and blood fucking _baby_ who is easier for you to love that hate.

She acts like a kicked puppy, tail between her soft, pretty white legs. She grovels and she apologizes and her huge blue eyes her red-rimmed and you want, you _ache_ to hate her. But the truth is, you just want things to go back to the way things were, too. So the ache turns into something else, more complicated and messy and indistinct, like your reflection when you get out of the shower and the motel mirror is fogged up and part of you wishes you _were_ rooming with the other girls. 

You try to lock it up, whatever you're feeling. The tendrils of vine that reach for her, like the vestiges of your old friendship are the sun. You're a bitch to her, cold and cruel no matter how low she gets, how much she begs. You watch the tail tuck more and more, up into the crotch go her shimmery red leotard. 

But in moments, it seeps through. Like out by the pool, when the rest of the girls are chasing each other around, shrieking and splashing while you and Cherry sun yourselves on loungers, cussing at them when little droplets of water land on your ankles. 

Ruth comes out in _all_ her clothes, a pair of baggy terry cloth shorts and a pullover because Ruth is always cold because Ruth is effortlessly thin, not an ounce of fat anywhere on her little body to warm her up, save for the soft heft of her tits you envy, that you crush beneath your palms when you miss her throat in the heat of the ring. 

She drops onto the lounger as far away from you as possible, at the other end of the pool where Jenny is messily French braiding Melrose’s hair while she sits on the edge and kicks water at the girls, yelling _polo_ every ten second to throw off their game. It makes you mad, but also lonely, so under the guise of retrieving an empty wine glass you left there last night, you wander over to her. “Only you could wear a Christmas sweater in ninety degree weather,” you announce. 

‘

She looks up from her notebook with comically wide blue eyes, like she’s shocked you’re talking to her. “It’s not a Christmas sweater,” she says. “It’s just got snow-flakes on it. It’s like, a generic, winter-months sweater.” 

“It’s September,” you remind her. “But we’re in LA. Might as well still fucking be August.” 

“Well,” she says, getting that self-conscious, impatient tone to her voice that always makes you feel like shit, like you pushed something fragile to its breaking point, even though you both _know_ she’s the one who broke _you_. “I don’t have sunscreen on and Shelia doesn’t wear any and I wanted to come out here _so,_ I threw on some clothes.” 

“Melrose!” you call. 

“Yah?” she snaps, whipping her head around and incidentally yanking the half-complete braid out of Jenny’s hands as she yelps. 

“Can I borrow your sunscreen?” you ask, knowing full well Ruth will refuse your own with the built in tanner. 

“Sure it’s in my bag,” she says, gesturing vaguely before asking Jenny, “Did you fuck up my hair?” 

You roll your eyes, picking your way around them, pretending this whole game is just a way to further wield power over Ruth, _hurt_ her, punish her. You know in your heart the best way to do that is just ignore her, though. Too bad that feels fucking impossible, like standing alone in a room while the oxygen is slowly sucked out. “Here,” you offer, tossing the bottle of copper tone to her. “Can’t have you getting heat stroke and ruining the show.” 

She frowns briefly, then fake smiles. “No! That wouldn't make you a very good as a producer, would it?” 

You don’t say anything. You just watch her rub sunscreen into her soft, pretty, white legs. 

“Go to hell, Ruth,” you eventually manage to get out. 


	4. lockscreen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Modern AU, Ruth POV, weight loss talk, angst, pining, motherhood, age anxiety, insecurity.Teen and up audiences.

They’re in the locker room after Zumba, Debbie leaning against the wall in her bra and puffing away on her vape pen while Ruth takes forever to change out of her work out clothes and into her jeans Her legs are sweaty and sore so her yoga pants cling as she painstakingly rolls them off, but she has an Uber driving shift after this and she _hates_ doing those in gym clothes because creeps always ask uninvited questions about her cardio routine or whatever. It’s worth the extra few minutes it takes to change, even if she has to endure the lime and vanilla smell of Debbie’s vape smoke as it billows around them. 

“Can you do that outside?” some incredibly fit nineteen year old in a crop top and designer sneakers shouts at them, squinting and faking a cough. 

“Oh fuck off,” Debbie yells back. “And _jesus,_ how much does your outfit cost? Or did Instagram pay you to wear it? _You’re at the gym!”_ she snaps, pretending to tap ash of the end of her pen. 

The girl skitters away, offended, and whispers something like “ _old bitches”_ under her breath. 

Ruth snorts, staring at the tile floor, feeling like she’s sixteen again and is somehow friends with the post popular girl in school, (who somehow thinks _she’s_ cool enough to hang out with, who hasn’t realized she’s _not.)_ Debbie’s fearless response to the world, to all the things Ruth would just sputter at or feel horrible about, never fails to make her feel like a teenager from Nebraska again, longing for something bigger, better, _more. “_ Wow,” she says, standing up to hop into her jeans. 

Debbie looks at her, once-overs her body in that way which makes her wonder if _she’s_ on the receiving end of Debbie’s generous judgement, too. “What?” she asks. 

“That was just harsh,” Ruth says, shrugging as she pulls her shirt over her head. 

Debbie’s gaze burns into her. “She’s in my pure barre class,” she explains. “She’s an entitled little millennial shit. Thinks she’s better than the rest of us because she's skinnier. I hope to god Randy doesn’t grow up to be an Instagram influencer,” she sighs then, and Ruth cracks up, wadding her sweat damp shirt up before stuffing it into her gym bag. 

“Oh god, the guys are the worst. With their rock hard abs and fake posi affirmations and gratuitous beer and beach selfies” she groans, finding and unlocking her phone, so she can pull up a profile to demonstrate. 

“Maybe Randy will end up gay, and promote like, brands I give a shit about. Skin-care stuff. Activated Charcoal toothpaste.” Debbie drawls, finally opening up her locker and rifling through it before pulling a J-Crew sweater on over her bra. Ruth knows the sound and motion of her dressing, but she doesn’t watch. Debbie can get away with watching her and make it seem totally normal, but Ruth has never been that sort of girl. Too mousey, too awkward, too _insecure_ to feel like she’s allowed to look at other women without exposing them to something poison in her. She’s not sure what it it is, because it feels too ugly and tender to press on, like an infected in-grown hair. 

“I’m glad I’m not raising a kid in the Instagram, era. I don’t know how you do it,” she offers, the whole thing sounding weird and hollow in her mouth. It’s hard for her to say she doesn’t want the things Debbie has, because of course, on some level, she _does._ Maybe not the baby and the boring husband, but the _jobs,_ the no-fucks attitude, the effortless, cruel beauty. 

“I don’t do it,” Debbie scoffs. “I just shoot shit at a wall in the dark and hope enough sticks to protect him from how goddamned terrifying the internet is. Maybe the planet and all of us and maybe even _instagram_ will be dead by the time Randy is a fully formed human and I won’t have to—wait. Am I your lockscreen?” she asks, interrupting herself, eyes flashing more green than grey for once. She makes a face, whips her head around in a little rewind motion. “Oh my god, _I am!_ That’s us from—god, that horrible acting workshop you made me go to, before we got insanely drunk on daiquiris at Ciftons to compensate for the fact we blew $300 on pure bullshit.” 

Ruth laughs, sudden and defensively as she folds her palm over her phone, thumb right over Debbie’s sunshine-bright, laughing face. “You weren’t supposed to see that,” she mumbles. “I _knew_ you’d give me a hard time about that workshop again.” 

“Fuck the workshop, I’m flattered I’m your lock screen,” she says, face actually softening for a moment, palm open on her chest after she tucks her vape-pen into her pocket. “That’s like—I mean, they say your lock screen is supposedly the most important thing in your life. Which is why mine’s always Randy, because if it’s _not_ the girls at pure barre think I’m a terrible mother. Which like, isn't _that_ terrible? It’s a fucking phone-screen, it means nothing. Like I’d be _just_ as good a mother if I have some flowers or a beach scene or a _fucking picture_ of my _fucking best friend and I_ plastered as my lockscreen, right?” She says, gesturing wildly, eyes wet at the corners, mouth drawn into a tight line. Ruth wants to smooth over it, soften it up, kiss it, maybe. She _hates_ when Debbie spirals into a dark corner she can’t pull her from. She doesn’t know what it’s like to me a mom, to be married, to be once successful and now washed up, to struggle with weight (even though Debbie’s body is goddamned perfect and she doesn’t understand, never _has,_ how someone like her can feel insecure about anything at all.) She doesn’t know what it’s like to take things for granted. 

“Gimme your phone,” she orders, holding her hand out. 

“What? No. I have nudes on there in case Mark ever decides he wants to fuck me again,” Debbie says cuttingly. 

“No, come on. Give it,” Ruth demands again, and their eyes lock for a long and lingering moment that smells like lime and vanilla before Debbie bites her lip and hands it over. 

Ruth scrolls very quickly past all of her photos, until she gets where she wants. There’s a blur of Randy’s face, Randy’s nursery room, Randy and Randy and apparently, Debbie’s nudes somewhere amid them all, and then Ruth starts to recognize the interior of Cliftons, and she stops. Most of the pictures are overexposed or out of focus, because they were taken after very many daiquiris and sort of in the dark, but there’s _one_ of the two of them. Ruth’s face round and reflective and white and taking up most of the screen, Debbie cracking up with her eyes shut and her mouth open and her blonde curls everywhere as she just throws her head back and laughs, cheek pressed so hard to Ruth’s there’s a smudge of highlighter there, glittering like gold dust. 

Ruth sets it as her lockscreen. 

“There.” she says, handing it back. “We’re matching now. And guess what? You’re still an _amazing_ mother.” 

It lands without bitterness, without anything at all but vanilla and lime, and Ruth is impressed with herself for playing the role of best friend so flawlessly, ingrown hairs hidden under layers of concealer, even if they ache somewhere beneath. 

Debbie actually tears up as she stares at the picture. “Ruth,” she says, pressing a hand to her lips, manicured nails flashing below the mascara line of her lower lashes. She’s beautiful, she’s _so_ beautiful, and Ruth wants to ask _why are you my friend, Debbie, when you have everything? When you’re the most important thing in my life, and I have to steal your phone to make me yours? Am I an accessory to you, something pathetic to keep close so you’re always_ more _beautiful in comparison?_ She knows it’s unfair though, so she doesn't say anything. She just snakes her arm around Debbie’s padded waist and squeezes. 


	5. wet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ruth pov, season one, explicit, oral sex, rough sex, face sitting, scent kink, angst, insecurity.

Ruth gets wet when she wrestles Debbie. 

The first few times she can ignore it. Chalk it up to bodies against bodies, skin against skin. Even misplaced tension, _something_ other than what it is: the fact that Debbie smells like the close, hot air in her room after she touches herself, and maybe she shuts the blinds and closes the door and does it sweating under the comforter because _that_ smells like Debbie after their aerobics class, and she’s always tried to get off to the memory of Debbie somehow, even if she refused to realize it. 

Everything is confused, fucked, tangled up. She has to wash her leotards after every practice, and _this_ is why. 

Ruth thinks it’s just her own dirty secret until some sad, lonely late night in Debbie’s motel room, when everyone else has left and they’re just repeating practice routines, working to get it right. Debbie thumps her down on her back, facing her bent, splayed knees, thighs spread over her face. It should last a second, a _split second,_ but then Debbie gasps, shifts, sits down so the crotch of _her_ leotard is mere centimeters away from Ruth’s face and—and Ruth can _smell_ her, spice and woman and salt and _woman,_ like her own scent but _more._ “What are you—” she means to say _waiting for,_ but instead of flipping her like the choreography dictates, Debbie freezes, drops, presses into Ruth’s face to smother her. 

“This is what you want, isn't it?” she says, grinding the crotch of her leotard over Ruth’s open mouth, blonde curls falling everywhere, tickling Ruth’s knees. “You—this is it. You pretend—” she gasps as Ruth reflexively grabs her, reaches up and gist her hands onto the soft, narrow tuck of her waist. 

She means to shove her off, but that’s not what happens. Ruth’s body has betrayed her _and_ Debbie before, this time is no different. 

She holds tight, squeezes, drags Debbie down so her weight is suffocating. Her breath is coming out in hot, stifled gales so she opens her mouth wider, fits her lips around the shape of Debbie’s outer lips through white, sweat-damp nylon and _oh._ This is what she had been looking for, when she sat on Mark’s dick and felt empty. This is what she’s been looking for all along. 

It doesn’t feel like a revelation as much as it feels like an admission of something long buried and always true. She sucks at the fabric stretched tight over Debbie mound, tongue pressing up into the crease so she wedges the fabric of her leotard deep, and Debbie must take that as an indictor of reciprocity because she makes a sound, legs tightening around Ruth’s shoulders before she fits her hand between the heat smear of Ruth’s mouth and her own cunt. 

“Here,” she chokes out, hooking manicured fingers into the crotch and pulling it aside, revealing so much sweet slicked pink between folds and blonde stubble. “It’s what you want, right? To pay your reparations, suck me like a whore so you can pay me back for—oh _, fuck,_ mother _fucker._ ” 

Ruth cranes up and licks right into her. To shut her up, sure, and to pay a reparation, maybe. But mostly because she smells so good and her mouth is watering and she’s never even considered, consciously, how this might feel but the second her tongue makes contact she’s _hooked._ Debbie tastes bitter like cigarettes, metallic like iron, sweet like champagne, and Ruth wants _more._ She pulls back just to suck in one frantic, terrified breath before she’s diving back in. 

The air around them probably smells like hairspray, like lotion, like deodorant, like sweat. But all Ruth can taste is the salty _gush_ of wet flooding out onto her tongue as she eats Debbie out with a sloppy, inexperienced mouth, humping the air, fishing up into the cascade of blonde curls falling all round her hips. 

When she pushes her tongue up inside Debbie, making her gasp, her gut clenches so spectacularly she writhes. It’s a long awaited contraction, something she’s been holding onto so long, before she got drunk enough to let Mark fuck her, before she even _realized_ this was the thing she felt compelled to do: fuck the husbands of the woman she envied. Soak up the memory of their wives as she rode them. Envy, love, desire. They don’t feel so different when Debbie is grinding down onto her face, rough and ruthless, moans short and staccato and indulgent. 

_I deserve this_ Ruth thinks blindly, not sure if she means I deserve to taste this girl finally, finally, or I deserve to have my face fucked until I can’t breathe, or I deserve to want someone I was stupid enough to make an enemy out of. Still, she palms up Debbie’s soft thighs, hands stained in spray tan as she sucks and sucks, thinking, _I deserve this. I deserve every second._


End file.
